Comment by lunar_mycroft
8 hours ago
Maintaining web standards without breaking backwards compatibility is literally what they signed up for when they decided to make a browser. If they didn't want to do that job, they shouldn't have made one.
8 hours ago
Maintaining web standards without breaking backwards compatibility is literally what they signed up for when they decided to make a browser. If they didn't want to do that job, they shouldn't have made one.
They "own the web". They steer its standards, and other browsers' development paths (if they want to remain relevant).
It is remarkable the anti-trust case went as it did.
According to whom?
Chromium is open source and free (both as in beer and speech). The license says they've made no future commitments and made no warrants.
Google signed up to give something away for free to people who want to use it. From the very first version, it wasn't perfectly compatible with other web browsers (which mostly did IE quirks things). If you don't want to use it, because it doesn't maintain enough backwards compatibility... Then don't.
The license would be relevant if I'd claimed that removing XSLT was illegal or opened them up to lawsuits, but I didn't. The obligation they took on is social/ethical, not legal. By your logic, chrome could choose to stop supporting literally anything (including HTML) in their "browser" and not have done anything that we can object to.
iIRC, lack of IE compatibility is fundamentally different, because the IE specific stuff they didn't implement was never part of the open web standards, but rather stuff Microsoft unilaterally chose to add.
The license is the way it is not by choice. We should be clear about that and acknowledge KHTML, and both Safari and Chromium origins. Some parts remain LGPL to this day.